


Conversations about Hux

by Aro_Ace_Austrian_in_Space, Filigranka, Lyledebeast, Potboy, sigynstark



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Conversations about Armitage Hux, First Order meta, Gen, Hux meta, Meta, Nonfiction, Other, and his upbringing, and the culture of the First Order, etc - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 07:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16908870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aro_Ace_Austrian_in_Space/pseuds/Aro_Ace_Austrian_in_Space, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigranka/pseuds/Filigranka, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyledebeast/pseuds/Lyledebeast, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigynstark/pseuds/sigynstark
Summary: Following the great Tumblr NSFW ban and the fact that many of us have seen this writing on the wall before and will not remain on a site where fanworks are censored, we decided to archive our Tumblr meta somewhere a little more stable and fandom friendly.These are a variety of conversations that we had about the structure and culture of the First Order, and the character and relationships of Armitage Hux - his culpability, mindset, upbringing etc.These discussions are posted in no particular order. In so far as I (potboy) have been able to, I've listed everyone involved as a co-author, and there are links to the originating Tumblr post in each chapter.





	1. Brendol's Sons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Filigranka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigranka/gifts), [Lyledebeast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyledebeast/gifts), [Aro_Ace_Austrian_in_Space](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aro_Ace_Austrian_in_Space/gifts), [sigynstark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigynstark/gifts).



[Lyledebeast:](http://lyledebeast.tumblr.com/post/180550911689/brendols-sons)

As an addendum to my last meta (and because I cannot will myself to grade one more essay right now) isn’t it interesting that the one character–besides Finn–who manages to get out of the First Order is also the the character who actually is treated like a son by Armitage Hux’s dad?

In spite of the fact that Brendol was a terrible person, in spite of the fact that his motives were probably bad, the attention and affection he showed Cardinal mean something, to Cardinal at the very least.  Even at the end of the Phasma novel when he realizes how much he has been duped by the titular character, he is still defending Brendol.  Armitage, despite his twisted views of human relationships,  knows that his father mistreated him and hates him for it.  Even with all the manipulation and brainwashing, Cardinal and Armitage feel the way they do about Brendol for legitimate reasons.

Caring for and emotionally supporting someone with bad intentions is still better for them than treating them with overt cruelty. I have to wonder if bonding with the person responsible for his welfare didn’t help Cardinal become sane and personable enough to be of interest to Vi Morandi and led to her rescuing him.

I suppose you could say that maybe Cardinal already had redeeming qualities and Armitage didn’t, and maybe that’s why Brendol decided to nurture him and freeze Armitage out.  That seems to be what Cardinal thinks. But it’s abuse apologism, and I’m not here for it. 

And of course, there are other factors to consider–like the feasibility of Cardinal being a torturer and a nice guy at the same time, for one.  But it is pretty clear we are meant to see him as redeemable, but not Armitage.  That he’s a nicer person than Armitage in spite of their shared past is also obvious. While it would be reductive to say that Brendol’s treatment of them is the only factor to play a role in that, that it plays a role at all is sad enough.

At the same time, I wonder what Brendol would think if he knew treating Cardinal like a son would contribute to his being Resistance pilot ex machina-ed out of the FO and treating Armitage like garbage would contribute to his being one blaster bolt away from the top position.  Would he be dismayed? Impressed? Was this his intent all along? I don’t mean he intended for Cardinal to defect, obviously, but maybe he didn’t care what happened to Cardinal as long as Armitage grew up to be as vicious and power-hungry as possible.

[Potboy (Galadhir on Tumblr)](https://galadhir.tumblr.com/post/180552838965/brendols-sons)

My interpretation of  _Phasma_  is that the reason why Cardinal was obsessed with digging the dirt on Phasma was that Phasma was now Brendol’s favoured child, and he was feeling the effects of being frozen out himself. It took him a couple of months of being treated like Armitage for him to also become obsessed with getting Brendol’s favour back/getting revenge on the person who took it away.

Whatever Brendol is putting into the water with those kids is  _really_  working, long after the point where they become adults.

Maybe treating his favoured cadets well was _intended_  to create cadets who could pass as normal, well-balanced people? Didn’t he develop the program originally so that they could go out into Imperial posts and advance his interests by stealth? They would have had to pass as relatively likable, competent people if they were to advance to high enough positions to benefit him in the future.

Meanwhile the non-favoured cadets were probably not meant to survive anyway, since he encouraged his favourites to kill the unpromising students as a way of improving the herd.

By which I mean that maybe Armitage’s long-term survival continued to be a frustrating anomaly in his system. 

 

**Lyledebeast:**

SW timelines are difficult for me, but I was under the impression that Brendol had been dead for years when Cardinal interrogated Vi; is that wrong?

“Maybe treating his favoured cadets well was _intended_  to create cadets who could pass as normal, well-balanced people?”

This really gets at why, for me anyway, Brendol feels so much less sympathetic than Armitage. It’s not because the things Brendol did are worse than what Armitage has done; they’re not.  But in a very real sense Armitage can’t be genuinely personable, or affectionate, or empathetic because these, like most “human” behaviors, are learned and his social setting wasn’t conducive to his learning them.  He’s able to manipulate others to strengthen his own chances of survival, but that’s all he can do. He’s a human who doesn’t know how to human.

I think Cardinal can actually do/feel those things, not just pass as being able to do so.  I think we’re supposed to be glad Vi saves his life because he “deserves”–boy do I hate that word–a second chance.  I don’t know whether Brendol is just passing or not; even some really evil people are capable of affection.  But if he is passing, he’s doing so convincingly enough to inspire real affection and loyalty in Cardinal.

TLDR; still real tired of arguments that A. Hux decided to be evil.

**Potboy:**

Yeah, the Phasma timelines are just a blur to me too, so you’re probably right there. My impression was that it was a fairly short time, but I couldn’t say why that was my impression.

To me Brendol is less sympathetic than Armitage because - as far as we’re aware - Brendol did join the Empire voluntarily, and then created a system to turn children into brainwashed murderers, again, presumably because he wanted to and he thought that would be a good idea. There’s no indication that Brendol was coerced or forced along that path. He chose to create monsters. Armitage, otoh is raised in that and by that. He’s the child of a child-brainwasher. That really suggests to me that he had very little choice in who he became.

As you say, Armitage’s tragedy is that he was kept close to his father, a man who had made a profession out of the psychological manipulation of children. There are definite times when you  _should_  deny the truth that is your family.

So yes. I’m totally with you that A.Hux has never really been given a chance not to be evil.

Cardinal is an interesting case. I know we’re supposed to find him likable and to be glad that Vi rescues him. But he never actually repudiates the First Order at all. His grudge is specifically with Phasma. He never actually chooses to leave - Vi gets him out while he’s unconscious, after which he presumably can’t go back without being killed as a deserter. 

He clearly believes that the FO is a force for good, and that the Stormtrooper cadets are lucky to be there. For some reason that comes across as a pleasant, humanizing thing in him, whereas A. Hux’s belief in the FO’s goodness is treated as fanaticism. Yet because Cardinal manages to come across as personable, we’re supposed to ignore the fact that he is also a FO true believer, who sneaks around behind his superior’s backs to kidnap high priority prisoners and secrete them away for private torture sessions so he can get the dirt on his colleagues.

Cardinal is a good example of how being favoured by the narrative leads to the reader wanting one character to be ‘redeemed’ over another, I think. 

I do think Cardinal genuinely loved Brendol, but then I think Armitage loved Brendol too. If he hadn’t, I think Brendol would have died a lot earlier (as Rax was clearly expecting when he’s dropping his  _nice father you have there. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to him. Here have a squad of killer orphans_  hints.)

**Lyledebeast:**

Lol, can you imagine if Rax had lived longer? Armitage grows older and more vicious, yet Brendol remains alive.  Meanwhile, Rax observes them, scowling like, “Tick tock, Armie.  Patricide time!”

Idk, I think having been abused by Brendol for his whole life may well have made him seem invincible to Armitage until Phasma, who was not brought up by him, arrives.  I don’t know if his hesitation was love or fear, or maybe a mixture of the two.  But if he did love Brendol, he’s probably the last person he ever loved and that is, um … too heartbreaking.  That’s why Hux fans have headcanoned Mama Rae Sloane to the point where people who aren’t Hux fans believe it’s canon (not to mention Armitage’s actual mother, about whom we know absolutely nothing except that she worked in the kitchen.)

Btw.  I just found a fic called  [Landslide](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F12113784%2Fchapters%2F27469728&t=MWIzMzY1MGJjMDc1ODE1ZTMyZWEzNDY3NWI0ZDA4ZGU3ZjNlZDNmZixNenZkcklxbw%3D%3D&b=t%3AmmHduGeGCzfIURUIpJruVg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fgaladhir.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F180626843195%2Fbrendols-sons&m=0)  about the Armitage and Cardinal and Brendol dynamic that I can’t wait to read!

** Potboy **

*G* I can’t decide whether Rax would be disappointed because he loved a bit of pointless gore, or impressed because Armitage also grew up to destroy worlds.

There’s a throwaway line in Phasma about Armitage always being desperate to impress Brendol that wrenched my heart because I read it as Armitage - as an adult - still being desperate to get a kind word from his father (and not succeeding.) Phasma made me think that all of those boys revolved around Brendol not with fear but with slavish devotion, hurting each other for a moment of his approval. It was all very sad and skeevy. And yes, it’s come to a very bad point indeed when Rae Sloane has to be cast as his maternal figure because she’s the most decent person around.

Landslide is brilliant! I found it really painful to read, but I think it’s shaped a lot of my headcanon ever since.


	2. Hux, Finn, and First Order “Privilege”

[Lyledebeast](http://lyledebeast.tumblr.com/post/180448893829/hux-finn-and-first-order-privilege)

Every time I see meta comparing Hux and Finn’s backstories, I’m reminded that I STILL haven’t written the meta I’ve planned for the past five months or so.  I’ve been waiting for “free time,” but this may be the closest I get to that.

My issues with this meta are that it is reductive–Finn is able to leave the FO because he is good and Hux remains because he is bad–and that it takes certain details from Hux’s backstory at face value when they merit more careful reading.

Both of these characters have tragic pasts, but their tragedies are different.  Finn’s is that he was taken from his parents and trained into a killing machine.  Hux’s is that he was kept close to his father and trained into a killing machine. That difference alone is pretty interesting.  One the surface, Hux appears to have certain privileges in comparison with Finn, and from a FO perspective, they certainly are advantageous.  He’s an officer’s son; he’s put in charge of a group of killer orphans who are all bigger and stronger than he is.  But these privileges are dubious to say the least.

Finn, on the other hand, starts off as a simple stormtrooper, no different than any other.  He is able to distinguish himself through his talents later, but by that time he has been able to form some degree of attachment to his peers.  One of the things that triggers his leaving the FO at the beginning of TFA is seeing one of his friends killed.  Now, I know that the FO discourages any kind of attachment among stormtroopers, but here’s the thing.  It obviously didn’t work! It couldn’t work in every case because stormtroopers are humans and humans are social creatures.  

Isolating an individual child, though, that can work very well.  And in the case of Armitage Hux, it certainly did. Being put in charge of the assassination orphan squad makes him special, but in so doing it also strips him of any commonality with the other children.  They obey him because Counselor Rax told them to and they have been trained to be obedient; it has nothing to do with Armitage personally.  Even with this authority, his dealings with the other children are quite vicious from the beginning because he doesn’t want to look like an easy target.  It’s little surprise that he grows into a man who has no close bonds with anyone, who sees other officers, the closest thing he has to peers, solely as allies or rivals.

Being Brendol Hux’s son also made him “special,” but why? Mostly because everyone knew that he was; his father certainly didn’t treat him better than other children.  It’s not a matter of avoiding favoritism; Brendol makes it abundantly clear to Armitage that Cardinal is his favorite. Lavishing affection on one child while withholding it from your own is … wait for it … abuse.  That thing some readers assume Rae Sloane put a stop to just because she told Brendol to cut it out.

 I see the idea that Brendol physically and psychologically abused Armitage presented as a canonical certainty all the time, but the only reference to this abuse in the books is notable for its uncertainty.  Sloane says, “I don’t know if [you are mistreating him] physically or psychologically, and I don’t care.” I hardly think Sloane’s uncertainty is lost on Brendol.  Maybe he physically abused Armitage as well, and that stopped when she threatened him, but maybe it was only ever psychological, and that plainly did not stop.  It seems clear to me than any benefit Armitage gained from her promise to protect him–which she couldn’t and didn’t keep–is outmatched by the harm done by keeping him with his father.

Almost all of the “privileges” in Armitage Hux’s past amount to abuse and abuse enabling. It’s actually quite beneficial to Finn that he lacked these advantages; if he had them, he probably never would have left the FO either.

** Potboy: **

I mean, Hux is privileged in the sense that he arrived in the FO with his own squad of assassins, a father who had been personally picked out to run the FO’s child recruitment, and an Admiral who has taken a personal interest in him. That probably insulates him from the worst of the physical hardship that’s going on in the FO at that point. He’s probably never had to resort to cannibalism like a lot of their recruits.

On the other hand the Admiral has lots of other things to do and is definitely no expert at recognizing emotional abuse if she even believes such a thing exists at all. I imagine if he ever complained about his father using his psychological tricks on him, she’d be the first one to tell him to stop being so sensitive and toughen up.

The fact that he’s probably never experienced the same degree of physical hardship than the other recruits means that they see him as weak and soft - a potential victim.

The fact that they see him as weak and soft, while the Imperial remnant sees him as spoiled and over-privileged means that he’s been marinading in an environment where  _everyone_  in his life constantly holds him in contempt. He can’t get any respect from the people either above or below him in the rank structure.

His father has actively specialized in the brainwashing of children to be loyal to him and to be killers. Brendol has been forced to teach Armitage everything that he knows, so Armitage  _knows_  that he’s being manipulated, that his loyalty to Brendol is partially artificial. But dammit, this man is also his father and it’s a powerful human desire to want your parent to love you.

Meanwhile Brendol is rubbing it in his face that he’s never going to approve of him, and in fact he loves someone else who was everything that Hux was not. It’s kind of bitter to think of Brendol still picking out his Commandant’s cadets and leaving his own son out in the herd of kids who just aren’t good enough and might as well be killed.

To be honest, I consider it a real triumph for Hux that he managed to kill (or to accede to the killing of) his father. I think Brendol ought to be proud. It shows a real strength of mind for a child who’s been conditioned since birth to seek approval from the person who was supposed to love and protect them to say “Look, no more,” and cut them out of their lives.

I don’t think comparing people’s abuse experiences to see who had it worse is a particularly useful thing, but I do think that Hux’s privileges don’t take away from the fact that he’s been in a uniquely personal kind of hell for most of his life.

** Lyledebeast **

I think it depends on what kinds of privilege you have in mind.  Absolutely if it weren’t for the special protection he has physically, he would likely have been the first recruit to be cannibalized.  So he has privilege with respect to the other recruits who came into the FO at the same time that he did.  However, the comparison I’m drawing is between Hux and Finn in response to the idea that because Hux has more privilege than Finn, he should have more agency, so if Finn can get out of the FO Hux  _certainly_ could.

I’m not trying to say that his abuse is unequivocally “worse” than Finn’s, though I can see how that might come across.  But the unique privileges that have kept him alive have also isolated him and that isolation has severely impaired his ability to connect with other human beings, which is exactly the ability that makes Finn’s escape possible.

I think if we’re going to compare these two characters, the different ways in which they were socialized and the effect this has on their personalities are worth paying attention to.

** Potboy **

Ah yeah. No,I wasn’t criticising you for focusing on Hux’s abuse–I agree with everything you say. I was just trying to say that even if Hux was privileged, privilege doesn’t negate abuse. You know? Just because you had a physically more comfortable life doesn’t mean that emotional abuse can’t mess you up spectacularly.

But yes, in the question of who could get out of the FO successfully, who has more agency, IDK. Probably Hux  _could_  have engineered a way out of the FO for himself if it had occurred to him to do so, but given his upbringing, why would it have occurred to him? He’s a true believer, he genuinely thinks the FO is there to do good, and he’s only one step away from being right at the top of it and able to  _ensure_ it does everything right from now on. He’s always been in a position where he could tell himself it was within his power to change things for (what he regarded as) the better.

By the time Finn leaves, on the other hand, he’s in a position where his only option other than leaving is to accept being reconditioned. There is a very direct, practical reason why he has to run at that point. And as  [@darthlenaplant](https://tmblr.co/moS_ATnEa3uAeNzdUDiBkIg)  says the Force (or the story) clearly helps him with that by putting a pilot in his grasp just when he needs one. I think Finn is meant to be exceptional for having got out at all. 

I just hate the argument that ‘if Finn saw that the FO is evil, why can’t the rest of them? It proves the rest of them are there as fully self-aware evil people who deserve to be destroyed.’ (Which I know is not an argument that you’re making, but it is an argument I see around a lot.) It irks me because different people have different circumstances and nobody should be judged for not having reacted like someone else. They didn’t react like that person because they aren’t that person, and any judgement they should incur should be based on their own life and not how much they measure up to someone else’s.

 

 


	3. Gender, Humor, and Comeuppance in TLJ

> [Lyledebeast](http://lyledebeast.tumblr.com/post/177780655134/gender-humor-and-comeuppance-in-tlj)

> This question has been on my mind lately.  If we’re supposed to enjoy seeing Hux get abused by Snoke and Kylo because of the evil things he’s done, why isn’t Snoke’s death more enjoyable? He’s in charge of the whole First Order; Hux spends most of The Force Awakens waiting for his approval to fire the weapon.  Furthermore, Snoke is the outside force who bears the most responsibility for turning Kylo Ren to the Dark Side. But if he shows any emotional at all about being cut in half by his protege, it’s confusion.  Where is his terror and anguish? Doesn’t he deserve to feel these things after all the evil he’s done?

> I think the answer to these questions is that Snoke is never presented as a figure of fun when he’s alive, so why should he be in death? 

>  For all that Starkiller Base gets brought up by people who feel a need to defend how much they enjoyed seeing Hux get thrown around by Snoke and Kylo in  _The Last Jedi_ , none of his punishment actually has anything to do with that incident narratively. It is only relevant in the sense that he no longer has that project to use as leverage to make himself indispensable.  There is no narrative reason for most of this abuse except to entertain an audience that wants to see Hux suffer. Not just because he deserves it, but because it’s funny.

> There is a lot of slapstick in this movie, and Hux is not the only man who is subjected to it.  Both Finn and Poe get roughed up by women–which is far more likely to read as comic than the reverse–but neither of them are defined by that for the duration of the film. It’s funny, supposedly, to see these strong men be tased, shot, and dragged around by much smaller women, but the emasculation they are subjected to is temporary

> Meanwhile, when Hux is thrown around by men who are much more powerful than himself, there is no irony.  Emasculation is not what makes him an object of ridicule, his characteristic lack of masculinity is.

> Consider the differences between the scenes described above with Rose and Finn and Leia and Poe and the one, partially cut from the film, where Finn and Rose are caught aboard the Finalizer and Hux interrogates them.  

> When he approaches them, it’s Finn whom he slaps–because not even the vicious General Hux is depraved enough to hit a woman–and slapping itself is a form of violence more associated with women than men.  Perhaps his intent is to emasculate Finn (again), to treat him like an errant child instead of acknowledging that he’s a man capable of making choices in spite of the First Order’s efforts.  If that’s the case, it’s very short-lived.

> In the earlier scenes.Rose has a taser; Leia has a blaster; neither is shown as able to overpower Finn/Poe on her own. When Rose bites Hux’s finger, though, he can’t even retrieve it  without help from several Stormtroopers, in spite of the fact that she’s much smaller than he is, bound, and on her knees.  That he’s screaming “like a little girl,” to quote numerous commenters, the whole time only drives the point home further.

> And this is only one scene out of many; Hux’s “skinny, pasty” body is attacked from one end of the film to the other.  And it’s no surprise. Violence against men whose masculinities are deemed suspect or insufficient has been stock in trade in comedy for a very long time, a lot longer than Star Wars has been around.  Such men are protected neither by their own physical prowess nor by cultural prohibitions on violence against women.  Of course, queerphobia has often been heavily inflected in such violence. If one reads Hux as queer, as I and many others do, it makes these scenes that much harder to watch.

> I’m not arguing that hating Hux is a problem; there are plenty of good reasons to hate him.  But it’s possible to hate him and believe he deserves his comeuppance while still recognizing that it is given to him in some troubling ways, and for some troubling reasons, in this movie.

> ** Potboy **

> I agree. I don’t think there’s any reason for treating Hux more like a figure of fun than Kylo (who is presumably equally evil, and yet whose abuse at the hands of Snoke is treated as sympathetic rather than laughable) other than the desire to rob him of his dignity and credibility as a villain. Which is a marked shift from how he was presented in TFA. 
> 
> I would like to be able to say that he comes in for the sissyfication treatment because he’s a fascist and nobody wants to be accidentally making fascists look cool. (I could definitely accuse TFA of making Hux look cool.) But if that was true, then Kylo would not be being given the shirtless romantic hero treatment instead.
> 
> Making a man effeminate as a way of making him laughable and unsympathetic is a trope that is bursting at the seams with homophobia and misogyny combined, and I do find it extremely distasteful. 
> 
> On an aside, though. I’ve often thought that the scene in which Hux slaps Finn is set up like a piece of theatre for the onlooking stormtroopers. If we go with a headcanon where the troopers’ conditioned loyalty is to Hux (and that’s why Kylo can’t kill him,) then the slap is a ritual denunciation. It’s like a parent disowning their child, or a beloved king turning their back on a traitor. It’s ‘you have personally disappointed me’ from someone that the stormtroopers have been raised from birth to want to please. It’s intended - I think - to be worse than the execution that is supposed to follow. After all, the stormtroopers must be used to the fact that their purpose is to die, but to die having been repudiated by the person to whom you have ultimate loyalty? That’s meant to smart.
> 
>  


	4. Villains with abusive backstories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This thread was obviously started off by Darthlenaplant, but I can't find you on AO3 to add you as a co-author. Please let me know if you're here under a different name!

[**Darthlenaplant** ](https://darthlenaplant.tumblr.com/)said:

"Like, this is 2018, and we still have "Villains are evil because their parents weren't nice to them" full at work? Can we have villains with supportive parents, thankyouverymuch? I mean, I've been saying this since the whole "Brendol was an ass to Armitage" thing came out, and I was like: "Really? Seriously? Is this all you could have come up with? This shitty trope that's been boring since the late cambrian? REALLY?"

**[Potboy ](https://galadhir.tumblr.com/post/177028623910/like-this-is-2018-and-we-still-have-villains) answered: **

IDK, I’ve always thought that there had to be an element of emotional abuse in Hux’s upbringing simply because he was brought up by rabid fascists in an echo-chamber of their own making. The kind of people who were singled out by the likes of Gallius Rax and Emperor Palpatine to perpetuate the legacy of the Empire (an abusive system) were never going to be the kind of people who could thoughtfully raise a child, or who even cared about trying. 

So yeah, it gets complicated because even if Brendol genuinely loved Hux (which he very well might), pretty much everyone in the FO grows up in a culture of abuse.

And then, of course, once The Secret Academy dropped, we knew that Brendol was the kind of man who encouraged the children in his care to kill one another in a quest for his favour (and for survival.) Even if a man like that loved his son, the son’s going to grow up with conditional affection and unspoken death threats as part of his environment. 

I know we liked the idea that maybe the FO was an actually legitimate alternative to a New Republic that didn’t seem to have done a thing about slavery and poverty in the Outer Rim. We hoped that they might be a kind of socialist, not exactly utopia, but at least a working alternative form of government that actually lived up to the implications of Hux’s speech.

But we knew we were reading against the intentions of the text all along. And the more canon that’s come along, the more impossible it’s become to sustain that reading. So now, I think the entire existence and internal structure and world-view of the First Order is abusive, and that even if Brendol did love his son, he would have abused him as a matter of course, because that’s who he was and that’s what his society would have demanded.

I think everyone’s agreed, for example, that Sloane is among the best of the Imperials, and it’s canon that she liked Armitage. But her reaction to a bunch of brutalized children who had been turned into murder machines was (a) this five year old can be responsible for them as long as he keeps them away from me, and (b) and he should learn how to make more of them. 

It never occurs to her to take Armitage out of that situation and raise him like an actual child with books and lessons and encouragement. And it never occurs to her to go ‘omg, what did you do to those poor kids? Get them a therapist immediately!’ She is quite content with turning kids into weapons as long as they’re not aimed at her.

In a society like that, it doesn’t matter whether Brendol loved his son or not. In fact it probably makes things worse if he did, because it would have kept that painful bond tight between them - it would have kept Brendol playing games to get his son to stay desperate for his attention, it would have kept Hux trying to move the world to get a kind word. If there was genuine love there, it would just have been the thing stopping them from walking away from each other and putting an end to the misery.

I agree with you that it’s not what we wanted, and I find it very painful to contemplate (it’s way too close to home.) But it’s more or less what we should have expected all along.

**[Lyledebeast](http://lyledebeast.tumblr.com/post/176996068949/like-this-is-2018-and-we-still-have-villains) said**

 

“It never occurs to her to take Armitage out of that situation and raise him like an actual child with books and lessons and encouragement. And it never occurs to her to go ‘omg, what did you do to those poor kids? Get them a therapist immediately!’ She is quite content with turning kids into weapons as long as they’re not aimed at her.”

How dare you speak so of Hux’s mother! Lol, you know I agree with all of this.  The fact that Sloane is the most “good” person he ever encounters is a source of no comfort whatsoever.

I vaguely remember enjoying Hux as a villain in TFA in a “Wow, Brendan Gleeson’s son makes a really compelling Nazi” kind of way.  But then I saw TLJ and later read more of his backstory and came to appreciate him in a much less enjoyable way.  I mean, I appreciate the backstory because it gives us so much more to talk about regarding Hux, and I think it makes it easier to understand him.  But it does create problems when the villain we’re just supposed to hate becomes more understandable than some of the heroes and the villain we’re  _supposed_  to sympathize with.   

**Potboy**

*G* I mean, when I’m scrabbling around for evidence that there might have been some small slivers of positive social interaction in Hux’s life, I do fall back on the fact that Sloane canonically says that she likes him. And the fact that Cardinal brings up Sloane’s name when he’s trying to influence Hux to do something suggests that her good opinion matters to Hux in return. So it’s not exactly motherhood, but it’s not the absolutely god-awfulness of everything else. 

I’m betting that having an influential adult around who didn’t hate him meant that  _he_  idolized  _her_ , (at least until it became a weakness that others tried to exploit), even if she considered him only a footnote to her life.

And yeah, I could not put it better. I thoroughly enjoyed TFA Hux, but each new piece of canon made it more painful to like him, but harder to stop caring, because he’s become more like a real person who - given the shitty hand that he was dealt - probably couldn’t have done anything else but what he did. By now my happy ending for the films involves the entire FO being sent to therapy and then re-forming themselves into the Outer Rim Emergency Services Corps, so they can do the good things they think they were designed for and feel good about it in the process.

Which means that I totally agree with you that now I have way more sympathy for Hux than I do for Kylo. Unless I accept the idea that Snoke was basically grooming Kylo from an early age, then I have to believe that Kylo  _chose_  the FO, and the worse the FO and Snoke get, the less good reasons there are for him to have done that. 

I suppose it’s possible to believe that he grew up with immense pressure on him as the face of the Alderaan diaspora, son of the famous Princess Leia, first of a new generation of Jedi, and he felt overwhelmed by that - not powerful enough to be what everyone wanted. And his mother was busy with the government, and his father didn’t understand, and then he goes with Luke and Luke tries to kill him. 

We’re used to thinking of him as a powerful and physical threat, but if he saw himself as too weak to live up to the expectations placed on him, and with no one to go to for advice, he might be open to listening to the first person who offered to solve this problem for him. And there’s Snoke who, tbh, seemed quite reasonable, even like a benevolent master through TFA and only showed his true colours later.

Young Ben’s just had his uncle try to kill him. He can’t go back to his parents because Leia doesn’t have time for him and she lies about important things like being Vader’s daughter, and Han doesn’t care. And Ben does not know his own strength - he thinks that Luke can find him wherever he goes; he’ll be hunted down and killed by his own family. But he has an offer of shelter, protection and training from Snoke to turn to. Snoke can save him from Luke and train him to the point where he will be able to protect himself… He just has to join this fascist organization in the mean time.

And of course he gets there and he discovers it’s an alligator-filled swamp of perpetual backstabbers who are all running on a fume of insecurity, terror and rage. He has to work closely with the worst of them, and because he’s an outsider he can see how small-minded, petty, broken and bent they are. So it’s not like he can make friends here. He doesn’t actually care about the FO’s mission at all. He hates it there. He hates Snoke. He wishes he could go back to his family but he believes they would just kill him. So all he can do is learn enough from Snoke so that he can become powerful enough to begin to determine his own destiny, but in the mean time he’s becoming habituated to the FO’s way of doing things, to their view point and to Snoke’s, and when he discovers a potential ally outside that trap, it may be too late.

LOL! I can tell myself that story and  _then_  feel sorry for him, but I’m not sure that that story is exactly obvious from what we’ve been presented with in canon. It convinced me, though, which is enough for me :)

**Lyledebeast**

Yeah, that’s the thing about canon.  There is always a story you can tell to make a character sympathetic, but I think the onus is on creators to  _actually tell that story_  if they want their audience to be sympathetic to that character!

We don’t have to say “but what if Hux was abused by his father well into adulthood?” It’s right there in the novels, not that that stops people from ignoring it.

One of the things–there are several–that bothers me about the Kylo Ren discourse is that people are so busy fashioning this reading wherein Kylo Ren is born of the flaws of the original trilogy heroes that they ignore Hux’s backstory  ~~or give it to Kylo~~.  I mean, yes, Leia is probably better at being a senator than at being a mom.  Han has always been more interested in adventure than domesticity, and that wasn’t going to change when he became a dad.  That hardly puts them on the same level as a man whose main contribution to the Empire was institutionalizing child abuse in its service!

Of course, it’s possible and even likely that these folks and I are literally just reading different books!

Different readings of Sloane and Armitage’s relationship are more difficult to account for.  Lately, what I’ve been seeing is people presenting her as a mother figure solely to drag Armitage for “choosing” Brendol over her.  I have no idea how one can look at the five sentences that describe their relationship in canon and come to that conclusion.

**Potboy**

Ha! I have no idea how anyone could come to that conclusion either, since it was Sloane’s idea to send Armie straight back to his dad to learn everything Brendol knew about child brainwashing. That’s a new take to me.

My experience is of people complaining that Sloane is an interesting, powerful, complex character in her own right, and one of a vanishingly small number of important black women in the SW universe, and people are not happy that she’s been reduced to a mammy figure for a more popular white boy. Which I can absolutely understand. Although I can also understand why Hux fans took one look at her and went “wow, she’s cool! I want her in my favourite character’s life.” 

Luckily I feel confident that it’s possible to do both. Brendol is part of Sloane’s faction, after all. There’s still room for her to be Hux’s admiral and hero without going down the ‘and she raised him’ route.

As far as Kylo goes, I think that just as you can’t (shouldn’t) compare Hux to Finn and say “clearly if Finn got out, Hux should have too,” you probably shouldn’t say “Hux’s childhood was so dreadful that Kylo should have had no problems dealing with his.” There’s absolutely no doubt that Hux’s circumstances were explicitly designed to make him turn out the way he has, and he deserves sympathy because of that. But Kylo has to be judged on his own merits and not by comparison.

I think a problem is that we - the audience - know the OT characters very well. We know that Luke would never have actually struck Kylo down, that it was a temporary thing that passed almost as soon as it happened. We know that Luke would never have gone on a man-hunt to try to find Kylo and finish the job. We know that even if Han was a bit freaked out by all this Force stuff, he must have loved Ben dearly and was doing his best.  _We_  know that Leia was fixing the galaxy partly  _for_  him, and was agonizing over when to tell him about his grandfather. But  _Ben_  might not know all of that.

He left his parents when he was a teenager to go and live with Luke? That’s not a time of life when you have the most accurate picture of your parents’ characters and motives. He was obviously sensitive - by which I mean easily hurt and prone to emotional outbursts - and he was obviously powerful not only in the light side but also in the dark. Leia and Han had no teaching in how to deal with that. And Luke had about a month from Yoda, who was all about repressing the dark side. So I do think it’s possible that Kylo thought he had no one to turn to, without having to claim the OT characters were bad in any way. They could just be humans who were already stretched by trying to rebuild the galaxy who had a child they didn’t quite know how do deal with for the best.

But still, no amount of apologetics could make me  _like_  Kylo, even so. I’m prepared to feel sorry for him and to hope that he can turn his life around, but he still grew up to be a violent abuser and I would not be at all happy to stand in the same room as him.


	5. TFA Hux v TLJ Hux

[lyledebeast](https://galadhir.tumblr.com/post/176062151915/sometimes-i-miss-tfa-hux-ohh-ren-made-a) asked: Sometimes, I miss TFA Hux. "Ohh, Ren made a mistake, Headmaster! Punish him!" Hux. He and Kylo were equal in their evil little shit-ness then, even though they had different kinds. I'm gonna rewatch TLJ soon, and I think having TFA fresher on my mind will make it even sadder when Hux tries to be Ren's voice of reason. Did you react to Hux differently in TFA?

** Potboy (Galadhir) **

Oh yes, lots differently. TFA Hux impressed me with his bravery in the face of Kylo’s violent outbursts to the point where I would have said TFA Hux was fearless. And he appeared to be the only competent one in the FO triumvirate, certain enough of his power and his untouchability to sneer in the face of Snoke. TFA Hux was someone who appeared to have his shit together - functionally admirable, if not morally so.

When his backstory started coming out, there was a stage where I found myself not being able to believe that a person with his traumatic and dysfunctional upbringing could possibly have turned out as together as he appeared to be. So when TLJ came out, and Hux was suddenly a bundle of anxiety with massive lacunas in his knowledge of how to deal with normal human relationships, I felt like he’d kind of evolved in accordance of the new backstory. 

I still felt impressed with how brave he was. This time it was evident that he wasn’t  _indifferent_  to pain, he very much didn’t like it, but it still wasn’t doing anything to make him grovel, even in the face of a lot more overt violence towards himself than previously. I didn’t like the change from micro-expressions to full out gurning, and I had sympathy for him rather than admiration, but I also felt that -given the new backstory- he was suddenly more accessible on a personal level.

**Lyledebeast**

That’s a really good point you raise about his backstory complicating him in TLJ.  I also think, though, that what makes him seem untouchable in TFA is that he’s in charge of Starkiller Base, which makes him a person of some importance.  A lot of his anxiety seems to stem from the fact that he no longer has the security his super-weapon gave him.

Of course, the other thing his super-weapon does for him is that it makes him unrelatable and terrifying.  I certainly didn’t feel bad for him when it was destroyed; he used it to blow up a planetary system.  He ought not to have done that; that wasn’t nice.  But then in TLJ his drastically different demeanor and appearance reflect not just his formative trauma but the more recent trauma of losing the source of his confidence.  He’s not afraid of Snoke in TFA because he had no reason to be, but he certainly does in TLJ (and the fact that he’s clearly already scared makes me wonder what Snoke has done to him prior to their first scene.)

**Potboy**

You know, despite that being blindingly obvious, it hadn’t occurred to me. Thank you :) I keep forgetting that TLJ starts only moments after the end of TFA. So yeah, of course. Hux has probably been building Starkiller for years–time enough for it to form a big part of his own identity at least. He should have been on cloud nine following its successful operation, but instead his major project has literally blown up in his face and he starts the movie wondering if Snoke’s going to kill him. Plus, all his officers now scent his blood in the water. He’s suddenly vulnerable, replaceable; this might be their chance.

Add insomnia to the looming threat of execution or assassination, with three quarters of his mind taken up by surviving the kind of FO infighting he’s lived with most of his life, and it makes a little more sense of the way someone the tie in books call a ‘military mastermind’ utterly bollixes up that first battle.

(I thought about adding that the canon is that he’s also inexperienced in real battle, but then I thought ‘but fuck it, hasn’t he been trained in simulations? Doesn’t the FO have a database of ancient battles that can be re-fought for training purposes? What the hell is going on with their training that a general can be ignorant of the fact that small fighters can slip through the defenses of large ships and therefore it’s necessary to deploy TIEs? I’m sorry, SW canon, but I just don’t believe that any military man could be that ignorant. I’m going to believe instead that Canady had been a bit vocal with his contempt for Hux, and Hux took this opportunity to get rid of him while Hux could claim to have been distracted.)

Initially when TFA came out I thought of him as an idealist (aka a zealot) - and it’s still tie-in-book-canon that he genuinely believes the rhetoric about the FO being there to right the wrongs of the corrupt Republic. But now I see him as first and foremost being a survivor. (Anxious, hypervigilant, paranoid, always ready to kill people in preemptive self-defense.) He might think his struggle for control is because of his belief in the FO, but actually what’s driving him is the desperation to achieve a place where he can finally be safe and valued. Which of course he never will achieve because (a) there is no such place in the FO, and (b) he’s managed to go about it by making everyone his enemy.

Which is terribly sad and makes me terribly sad.

[Filigranka](https://filigranka.tumblr.com/post/176030874546/sometimes-i-miss-tfa-hux-ohh-ren-made-a)

Y’know, I’m at constant awe how much our headcanons align. In. English. ;)

“I’m going to believe instead that Canady had been a bit vocal with his contempt for Hux, and Hux took this opportunity to get rid of him while Hux could claim to have been distracted” - HA! You and me both, I wrote it, I wrote (sure, in a little 24-hours crack in which Poe is FO’s double agent - which is, I think, what more than half of Polish fandom believes-until-the-next-film in a collective attempt to make sense of the situation - but I wrote it!). Somebody else see this as the one possible, the most logical explanation! Yaaay. <3 

Blah, I don’t know why the musings below become so long, but if I start to edit it now, I’ll never post it. This is exactly what happened to my reply the previous night - and now you already mentioned half of it in a much more succinct way, thankfully (I can still edit it more and post later, if you’re interested in “why Fili thinks Hux changes the modes of his  _performativité_  in TLJ in-world. outside-world, we know, because of the director”). ;))

 

Little me went ask wiser, experienced people and they confirmed my suspicion that no amount of tactics training and simulations can make one good commander/smuggler/soldier/anybody for sure, because it’s just - some people are able to think in the actual crisis/high-stakes situations and some are not, and how good they’re in the theory or even training isn’t always indicative of this, because the emotional situation is different. So I think that there’s tons of reasons behind his mistakes. Tons of. Exhaustion and the dangerous environment is one of them, definitely.

Trying to clean this mess of tangled thoughts via points. XD

1\. I think - I told you already, I know - Hux is a very, very, very good courtier, but very good courtier usually doesn’t make a good king. Good commander. Not even good shadow eminence necessarily. Courtiers are more concerned with how the higher power sees them, with their standing on the hierarchy ladder. And there’s always someone you answer to, someone who judge you and they’re your primarily concern, not your actual results. It’s not a good environment for creating a person able to make quick, completely independent, unpopular and often not-so-safedecisions. This demands some sort - self-confidence, sense of real self-worth and safety, so to speak? (or a great talent). And sometimes people raised in abusive environments had this traits in their professional lives - but very often they’re not. 

(Digression: not a good gamble, and I think - putting the morality totally aside, because I doubt FO concern themselves with it much - that was Brendol’s mistake in terms of what he, probably, intended. The fact that his son killed him was a blunder of them both, Armie’s because he drastically lowered his survival chances in a long game for a quick gain - everybody would go after his father first, that’s just a common sense, Armitage would at least get, idk, fifteen minutes. much can happen in a fifteen minutes - Brendol’s, because he raised him too badly if he was able to do so. Blunder, from the… dynastic?… very long term perspective. But this is not a uncommon one, tbh.)

Sure, that’s true about everybody in FO and so I believe most of the people there wouldn’t be good at commanding battles at all, perhaps except the older generation, which, in turn, probably wasn’t so great at surviving. ;) They would be decent enough Senators, come to think of it, they could take the power democratically. Silly boys and girls. ;)

And what TR did was just - use it. Attack personally, so to speak, aim for the public (within FO) image and the reputation, and the standing withing the court. More psychological or diplomatic than military manoeuvre. I think, and I remember I also mentioned this to you, sorry for repeating, that what Disney shows us (intentionally or not. I bet on the second) is the war of the symbols mostly. The war which is concerned, fuelled and led by symbols more than the logical, tactics - any actual, material results. Power is wield by the symbols. The war about the soul of the galaxy, not its body, so to speak (and the one, which I think is important, which doesn’t concerned most of the galaxy, for what we see in the films; they’re two private groups, both high on symbolism, wrecking havoc). Both sides are wasting resources on symbols, symbols, symbols (and what those symbols are is very important, IMHO, and one of mine main problems with new SW/EU - the damn last scene of TLJ with this boy -  _a boy_   being dragged into the war narrative and not for Republic, btw, not for the martyrs of Hosnian, no, for _the Force, Skywalkers, Leia_  - it left me shaking with rage; but that’s another subject). And Leia herself is a powerful symbol, especially for the old Imperials, I’m sure. Her name is a magic spell. I’m not sure if Hux could, from the court, not the battlefield, perspective, let such an occasion slide. And then - then he was trapped, again, from the court, not battlefield perspective, but he was never on the battlefield, but the whole life in the court. And this is what I think they mean - I mean - when I say he was inexperienced. He couldn’t stop remembering the court around him, his social standings etc.

Poe could, btw, too much even, I daresay, for I would court-martial him for not listening to the orders - killing more people than it was necessary to accomplish their objective - absolutely. 

2\. Le second thing - strategy and tactics are two different things, and I still believe Hux was good at the first and probably great the logistic, which is a part of the strategy (I didn’t see any rats or trash on the Starkiller base, so it was organised well), but that doesn’t necessarily makes one great in commanding the small tactical field. And this wasn’t a great battle, let’s be honest, that was mostly - shooting from cannon to the flies. Blunder made my following symbols, again, but most important, I think it’s still possible he’s a good general, strategist etc. - he’s the voice of reason when it comes to firing Starkiller the second time, isn’t he? (kill the bourgeoise, not the Rims, what, what, the Rims are ours, ah, tactical allies! XDD) - and small tactical battles - organising the battles at the level of the one unit - aren’t his forte. Logistic and Grand Strategy General is still very much needed and value-able, and impressive, you normally have lower officers to take care of the small-scale. But, ah, the - how’s “ławka kadrowa” in English? XD - FO probably just doesn’t have enough (still alive) people.

3\. But still, I honestly think that at the beginning of TLJ Snoke’s trying to make the older officers stage a coup, for he hasn’t got the auctoritas to actually kill Hux - which Hux probably doesn’t realise, and Ren, I think, neither - because this is the only way things make sense to me. This or “every one of us would lead FO better than Snoke” aka “in a small-scale battle against Leia’s forces would put in charge one of the older officers, who experienced battles with the Rebellion - aka Leia’s previous forces - and not expect from someone good at logistics, organising and even perhaps general big image, that he’ll also be good at small tactical battles, when he never in his life was into the one”.

I think it’s all like Stalinist USSR - not only it, of course - very much like it. Just look at the WWII USSR tactic/strategy, there were so many terribly bad decisions which was made because of the mad dictator, because everybody was concerned with the mad dictator and his opinion much more than with the actual results (plus, the USSR had many, many people; that’s something FO is lacking. so USSR could use this terrible, genocidal tactics, because they had, ah,  _resources_. that’s the difference). They killed their own troops right and left, Hux’s - oh, damn it, some obsolete rules say I can write just ‘ after “x” and I’ll revive them, “x’s” looks so terrible it hurts - Hux’ blunders are nothing compared to it. Because Germans might kill you, but Stalin (and inner factions, and special services, and factions connected to the occupied countries, so your officers… but let’s simplify it) surely would and he was much closer threat.

Dysfunctional system with a few big weapons. Mhm. Sounds right. ;) But my sacred “they’re not space Nazis, but space General Peripheral Terrorists or Communist-if-you-need–some-realworld-ideology” belief is probably another meta territory. And I’m starting my shift, so. XD

**Potboy**

 

I think you’re right about it making a real difference to your decision making abilities when you’re actually under fire, as opposed to knowing that it’s a simulation. And if Hux’s first priority had been to get rid of Canady in a way that didn’t look like he was actually responsible for the man’s death, then a certain amount of his incompetence is actually him capitalizing on the fact that nobody in the FO (other than the old Imperials) were really thinking straight at the time.

He’s either really not thinking straight (due to exhaustion, inexperience and multiple death threats from all sides, including from Snoke and his own people) or he’s decided that Canady has to go and is prepared to sacrifice the dreadnaught with everyone on it to achieve that, and he’s willing to look incompetent for the five minutes it takes before he can restore his good standing (with Snoke) by mentioning the hyperspace tracker. “I know I was a bit overwhelmed there and lost a ship of no particular value, but here’s a previously-thought-impossible piece of technology and in the larger scheme of things, the dreadnaught doesn’t matter.”

Whichever way it is, it translates to Hux being better at playing the game of survival against his own side than he is at actually fighting a war, you’re right about that :) (So yeah, in other circumstances he would have made a great senator.) I like the idea that he might be better with strategical planning than he is with current battle tactics, if only because tie-in-book-canon specifically calls him a military mastermind, and I would like to think book canon and movie canon weren’t  _completely_  contradictory.

I know what you mean about Brendol! Seriously. Look at Cardinal and you can see that Brendol  _could_  have brought up his son to idolize him, which would have saved Brendol’s life (probably) and made the Huxes a more unstoppable team. And Hux wanted his dad’s approval right up to the point where he had him murdered. It wouldn’t have taken much. IDK *shakes head*. Brendol really dropped the ball on that one.

It’s interesting that you think Snoke was trying to instigate a coup at the beginning of TLJ. I keep wondering what is it that stops Snoke and now Kylo from killing Hux? Why is Kylo more afraid of Hux than the other way around? What do you think is the reason? 

My theory has always been that–since the Huxes were responsible for the Stormtrooper program–every Stormtrooper in the Order has been programmed to be personally loyal to Hux. 

Look how even Cardinal–who loved Brendol and was jealous of Hux–never even thought of raising a hand to Hux when he found out that Hux had had Phasma kill Brendol, but instead rushed straight off to confront Phasma. It didn’t seem to occur to either of them that Cardinal might attack  _Hux_  over it.

So yeah, my theory is that Kylo has to tolerate Hux because otherwise he would lose his whole army (pun intended.)


	6. The Bombardment of Parnassos

**Sigynstark ([bxwtothefirstorder](https://bxwtothefirstorder.tumblr.com/post/176903382190/hux-and-they-changed-his-eye-colour-from-blue-to) on Tumblr) wrote:**

(So there’s this bit I can’t get out of my head lately [[source](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FArmitage_Hux&t=Mzg2ZjQ4Y2RmZmM5NWVlMjE1M2JhNWRkNzYxYWUwYzNkMGZkYTcwOCxmZjlmOGZhNDk2OGM1Yjc3NTgyNzE4NWM2YmQ5YzM3NjFlYzhhMDNi)]:

_“Around twenty[years](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FStandard_year&t=YmJhNGFkYTcyZDhjNzRiZjhjM2QzZmY5ZjRiYjQ4ODViNWQ1YTZkMSxiMTdiZTczMGRjODk0ZmJlYjJkMGExZDg2NTQ2NTg1ZDgzMzI5ZWY3) after the [Battle of Endor](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FBattle_of_Endor&t=ZGIyZWM4NTFkYTFiYmU5ZDdmMDgwNzhhYzY4OGM4ZjcyZWJmOGJiYiw0NzM5MDdmYzkxYTE5OGMxNWU0NTljNTMwYzQzN2I1ZGYxYWQ4ODIy), Hux ventured to [Parnassos](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FParnassos&t=NWFiNmI4NzM4ZDE2ZTU5Y2MyN2VlZWU1ODkxOGU5ZjMwZTM5Yjk2Yiw3MmRjMjhlNmUzZTJmY2YwMmE1NTJkMmQxMWIzODY0NzEyZWQ5YjZm) to respond to the [distress signal](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FDistress_signal&t=MmZhNDlmNTg0NTIxMmY1MTMyZjc4ODUwOTRkYWVhOTU5NzFhZTA5MyxiNTgzZmQxNWU2OGM2YzViYmM0NTEzYmJmZTVhYzEwM2ZjMWYwZjBm) sent by Brendol from the crash site of [his ship](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FPalpatine%2527s_yacht&t=OTU1OWEzYWQ0ZTM2ZGQ4MjExZWNlY2MyMzM1NDIzZDgwOGRkM2EyNiwxN2RlZWMyOTZlZDQ4ZTQyOTAyMzFmZTY4ZjRjNTFmYWM1NTY1Njdm). Hux arrived at the crash site personally, greeting his father, [Phasma](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FPhasma&t=MDA3ZGFjMDAzMGM2MTc0ODUxZjIxZjRjZmVlNWQyYjIyNGE2Zjk5NywzM2Q1OWVkNmYwZTRkNjM1MGRmOThjNmRjZTQyY2I4NmI3YWE2N2E0), [Siv](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FSiv&t=OTJjZDVmMjVmOGI3NDE2NGEwMjQzMTQzYWYxNDBhNGRhZWI1NjAyNywyMmE2ZmFmNDdhMmQwYjE2OWEzNzUxMjk1Y2ZkZmYwYmVhNDg0Y2Jh), and [Frey](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FFrey&t=NDQwZGU4ZDlmMzBkOWFhNmI2OGY5ZTNjYmY5NjQxOWVjYjlkYjVlZSwyM2I2ZjdmYzcwN2ZjZTVlZmZhZTUxMzgyMDlmYjA1ZjEzMzc2OTA5) impersonally and accepting Phasma and Frey into the First Order. Hux told his father that his disappearance had caused concern in the higher ranks of the First Order and that he needed to return immediately, as the [Supreme Leader](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FSupreme_Leader&t=OTUzOGI1OWRiZWFiZmVmM2JlOTAwZGQ0NDk5ZmFiMjMwNGU5N2RjNCxiYzJkN2M4Njk2ZDUwMjZiMzA1ZTAxOGZiNjBiZDI3NmVmYTlhMGRl) had many things to discuss with him._

_As he rode with Brendol, Phasma, and Frey to the[Resurgent-class Star DestroyerAbsolution](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FResurgent-class_Star_Destroyer&t=ZWJlNDQxOWNjNTc0ZjI5ZmM5MjgyNDZmNTljYWMyNjYwYzY3ZDlkOSxjYzA3OTdhMmEwYzE1MDZjYjA4YjA2NGY0Y2FjNzEzZjViNWY2Yjgx), Hux bore witness to Brendol's [orbital bombardment](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FOrbital_bombardment&t=NzkyYTQwNmU0ZmQxNDkyYjQwNjVhODAxMDZhMDZlMjdiNDZlNTE2OSwxNGQyYTlkMmM5NmQxMzNhZDA2Y2ZjNzllYWJjMDMyZDQzMTQ0NDhi) of Parnassos. Footage recovered from the shuttle that transported them to the Absolution was later recovered by [Resistance](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FResistance&t=OWVhYzRkMzVkMGRlMGJlYTI0MGM2YTNlMmY0ZmQzMjEzNzNmNWMzMiw3MmMzOTFlODVmODMwNDg5YTBjOTIxMzJiODBiOTZjODM1ODhlNTAy) intelligence agents. One of these agents, [Vi Moradi](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FVi_Moradi&t=Zjk3ZjZhOTBiYzcwOTExODE2YjA4MWM1MDhjOGM1ODQ4ZTI0NGQ2OCw0ZGJhNGVkNTIyNzUxMjA2NTllY2RjYTUwY2FhMTFhZGYyZjQxZjY1), viewed the recording and said that the look she saw Armitage giving Brendol was one of pure loathing.”_

This last bit. The look Armitage gave Brendol was one of pure loathing. Why? Because of the orbital bombardment? Because Brendol attacked the planet without warning the people there? Because it was totally uncalled for?

After this though, he manages to get rid of his father, but why did it upset him to see that bombardment? Like, he himself destroyed entire PLANETS later, did he feel that was justified? Given the speech and all? Did he just tell himself that the destruction of the Hosnian system was a must to achieve his goals while the destruction of Parnassos was, as a matter of fact, useless? Or did he fire at those planets because the Supreme Leader Snoke ordered it? Maybe he never would’ve done it if a much stronger entity didn’t make him do it? I also thought maybe it upset him that his father attacked relatively innocent people there but then again, he’s done the same later…

I can’t get this out of my head.

And also, another thought, I just want to know what he’d do if once no one stronger than him beat him into submission. He’s been terrorised in his entire life damnit. Even the child soldiers intimidated him when he travelled with them for the first time [then his first order to one of them was to a kid to punch another kid. Just because he could. Fitting.]. Most of us know about his asshole father and we all saw how Snoke and Ren treated him.

Would he be different if he wasn’t forced into situations, I wonder? And if yes, what would he be like?

~~Meanwhile I remind myself that this character doesn’t even exist, over and over again. 😂)~~

 

**Potboy (Galadhir on Tumblr) wrote**

TBH, when I read the book it didn’t seem to me that Armitage was reacting to the destruction of Parnassus, so much as that it was a look of pure loathing in general. The Phasma book is very clever about giving us nothing really solid to go on - everything it does give us is filtered through the preconceptions of various unreliable narrators. So I suspect that there is no definitive answer to this. Hux is a slippery character who seems to change with every new piece of canon. 

If we were talking about TFA Hux (a competent military leader who was a ‘true believer’ in the FO’s mission) I would say that he destroyed the Hosnian system because it contained the Republic’s government and military - it was a good move in terms of winning a war with a single stroke. That Hux might regard the destruction of a nowhere planet like Parnassos as (a) wasteful and (b) against the FO’s mission to ‘civilize’ the outer rim, rather than to destroy it.

If we’re talking the Hux from the Phasma book (a good judge of character and a power behind the scenes, caught in an unhealthy web of emotional abuse centered around his father) I would say that it was possible that he was disgusted with his father because he saw the symptoms of Brendol having turned up with a new favourite in tow, and he was already trying to figure out how to stop Brendol from using Phasma against him the way Brendol had used Cardinal. For that Hux, I don’t suppose the destruction of the planet mattered to him one way or another, except as an opening through which he could get to Phasma.

As far as TLJ Hux goes, I really don’t have a clue. I presume that he loathed his father because his father loathed him, and also because Brendol was in his way. He’d probably already moved into his father’s rooms and turned up at Parnassos hoping to find the old guy was long dead and eaten, and it was a disappointment to see him back with a new protege.   

(IMO the writers are all agreed that Hux is evil but none of them have consulted on exactly what kind of evil. They’re like ‘oh, just any kind of evil. Put all the evil in there, whether it contradicts itself or not, who cares?’ So he’s a militaristic mastermind in charge of technological terror, and at the same time he’s an incompetent promoted above his station and then kept there because for some reason neither Supreme Leader thinks they can do without him.)

**Lyledebeast wrote**

“He’d probably already moved into his father’s rooms and turned up at Parnassos hoping to find the old guy was long dead and eaten, and it was a disappointment to see him back with a new protege.”

Lol, I love this so much!

I agree, too, that Hux looking at his father with loathing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the destruction of Parnassos. That’s just how he looks at Brendol when he thinks no one is watching. Like, look my dad over there, doing things.  Existing.  What a dick.

Not that he hasn’t done plenty to justify Armitage’s hatred of him.  I absolutely think Hux could’ve been different if his whole early life hadn’t been defined by 1, his father abusing him and 2, other adults seeing this abuse and still deciding keeping the father and son together was fine because it was good for the future they were planning.  Hux is as much of a victim of the First Order as anyone, but because he was put in a position of power at such a young age, he’s less likely to see that than someone in a less privileged role.

**Sigynstark**

(I’m linking his described expression to the orbital bombardment because the site states that it happened just when  _it happened_. Yes, it was a waste of fire power but why would he even care about it when they had tons of technologically advanced stuff to take care of everything else, like, why did it matter at all? Maybe because they kidnapped children from the outer rim to train soldiers out of them?…

Yes, maybe it’s just the best/worse moment when he was caught when he thought nobody was looking. And that thought, too, that everyone around them fucking knew Armitage was abused and barely anybody wanted to seperate them, this, uh, it’s just like reality when there’s an abusive father, isn’t it…

I don’t think he’s incompetent, though. Especially in TLJ, well apart from the moments when he got carried away at the start - though, Poe hinted at his mother, probably a very sensitive point for him, just what if Brendol used her mother as a tool to torment him, we’d never know -, there are many scenes which prove it to me that he knows what he’s doing. After all, he learned a lot of stuff about war and learned from the old one’s mistakes… sort of.  ~~Let’s not talk about how Phasma turned off the shields and the blasted thing blew up on it’s own like a popcorn in the microwave, duh.~~

Anyway, it’s so cool I can talk about it without being judged, you two are awesome!)

**Potboy**

Ha! Thanks :) (General) Hugs to you too, and thanks for opening a discussion :) This is the kind of thing I’m in SW fandom for atm, and it doesn’t happen often.

I did go to the Wikipedia entry and read it just now, but I also remember the scene from the book, and I think the wiki has summarized it in a way that leads you to a conclusion that the book doesn’t. I did find _Phasma_  a really frustrating book to read because it is so deliberately a story within a story told by a narrator who you can’t entirely trust. So Vi Moradi may think that Hux is loathing his father at that point because Brendol just did a loathsome thing (bomb the planet), but I don’t know whether that means she’s right.

I mean, it could well be that she is! In which case, perhaps he loathes the particular cruelty of blowing up Phasma’s planet just at the point where Phasma had committed her life to the order. Perhaps he thinks that was a dumb, show-off sort of move of the kind that’s more likely to undermine Phasma’s loyalty. (As indeed it turned out it was.)

Or perhaps he thinks that there were obviously plenty of other desperate people down there who could have been enlisted in the FO instead of just killed. I know  _I_  thought it was a profoundly stupid waste of a labour force who would have been delighted to work for the FO for food. If they’re really trying to turn into a legitimate government (as Hux seems to believe) then they really ought to be trying to govern their planets rather than laying waste to them.

As far as separating Armitage and Brendol goes, I’m pretty sure that Imperial/First Order culture doesn’t recognize the idea of emotional abuse. As long as Brendol wasn’t knocking the daylights out of his son where Sloane could see, she would consider that problem solved. Objecting to Brendol’s imaginatively nasty tricks (like adopting one of their foundling boys and showering gifts and favouritism on him while his own son was desperate for a word of approval,) would only have got Armitage rebuked for being too sensitive. So yeah, life with Brendol must have been a merry round of mind-games, which Armitage could never win.

Re incompetence, we know that Captain Canady believes that Hux is too inexperienced to be in the position he’s in. [@filigranka](https://tmblr.co/mEBtWGEEUGkzyLxnWQoYoNg) and I have a theory that Hux used Poe’s attack as a way of getting rid of Canady, who had been a bit too vocal with that view. Using others to get rid of his enemies for him is absolutely his MO.

And as [@lyledebeast](https://tmblr.co/m1UhN_sN_1G3K4V4VsVTpPg) says, being in a position of privilege in the Order gives Hux a way of tackling his life situation from the inside. His choices are more open than just obey or die, so it makes sense that he has probably never even thought of the option of leaving. He’s really spent all his life playing against the other members of the Order for survival, prestige and rank. He’s only got one more step before he can do whatever he likes. Why would he give up now?

I like to think that he still believes that once he got there–once he finally made Emperor or Supreme Leader–he would make everything run properly and bring beautiful order and harmony to the galaxy.

(I don’t think he would actually achieve that, because the Order seems to run on backstabbing and he’d be way too busy putting down uprisings, coups, assassination attempts and the phantoms of his own hypervigilance. But I like to think he  _believes_  he would be the one to do it right.)

**Lyledebeast**

“I’m pretty sure that Imperial/First Order culture doesn’t recognize the idea of emotional abuse. As long as Brendol wasn’t knocking the daylights out of his son where Sloane could see, she would consider that problem solved. Objecting to Brendol’s imaginatively nasty tricks (like adopting one of their foundling boys and showering gifts and favouritism on him while his own son was desperate for a word of approval,) would only have got Armitage rebuked for being too sensitive.”

You make a really good point here.  It hadn’t even occurred to me that Brendol was treating Cardinal like a son to stick it to Armitage for being “unworthy” of him, but that totally makes sense.  (Cardinal, of course, is oblivious to this.  He’s good at being oblivious where Brendol is concerned.) And Armitage is already as “thin as a slip of paper and just as useless;” he can’t afford to be sensitive too!

I also think it’s important to note that Sloane even admits she doesn’t know what kind of abuse Brendol is inflicting.  She says, “psychologically or physically, I don’t know, and I don’t care.” It absolutely begs the question of how effective she can be in stopping something when she doesn’t even know what she’s stopping.  Maybe the abuse was physical (Sloane’s comment here is the only thing I’ve found that explicitly suggests this) and then it became more psychological to be better hidden.  It’s still abuse.  And when Armitage comes to pick up Brendol on Parnassos, Rae Sloane isn’t present.  We know she’s still alive at the end of the Phasma novel because Cardinal mentions her, but that’s all we know.

Personally, I find it quite easy to believe that Brendol abused Armitage in one way or another until Phasma killed him, so it was pretty hard for me to empathize with Cardinal’s dismay when he learns the truth.  

Seconding thanks to [@bxwtothefirstorder](https://tmblr.co/mxGmagoovxoFmDM_sepgrbg) for opening this discussion! I am always happy to talk about Hux and his misfortunes, lol. 

**Sigynstark**

(Hmm if I think about the methods Armitage used and mentions even to Kylo — I honestly wouldn’t think stormtroopers aren’t abused at all, physically and/or mentally, kept in fear, right from their childhood, to serve the Order and stay loyal. What if Brendol wished his son to be the same, to follow his orders blindly, without question, in fear of being hurt again? What if Armitage was the first Brendol tested his methods on? Because let’s face it, inflicting fear on people will make most of them submit. “Fear is the best insurance money can buy.” When Finn left in TFA I wondered why other stormtroopers never thought of leaving before? And I did get to see why, in TLJ, when he finally got caught.

I love the touch of how Brendol ended up dead though, I hope the old fart suffered. A lot.

Again, I still think Armitage put a lot of effort into staying alive until the last moment of TLJ, and I do hope that when/if they kill him off — because let’s face it, they probably will 😭 why must aaalllwaaays the good side win, I’ll NEVER understand… —, it will be a good death. My favourite AU idea now is that somehow he ends up away from Kylo and without that pressure it turns out he has the Force and wins everything basically. Hehe. I’ll write that AU because I won’t get it canonically, I’m afraid. 😂 Though I remember there was a hint he might be Force sensitive…

I remember seeing the first minutes of the movie where he gets mocked and falls apart and I literally  **CRINGED**  when Snoke mopped the floor with his face and my reaction was  **NOOO**  while everybody laughed about it around me. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because I know more about his past than the people around me,  ~~or because I have a lil’ crush on Mr Gleeson lol,~~  but I didn’t find it funny at all. Maybe I’m a bit too obsessed with his character, I’m not sure, but I hate to see him fail and suffer. Sometimes I wish he’d stop holding onto the ideas and beliefs his father forced on him and would just join the Resistance somehow because let’s face it, 99% of the shit happens because of Kylo and both sides need him  **GONE**  lol. It’s still strange that the creators put those scenes in so people would laugh, but I couldn’t even smile and think ‘omg is he okay??’

And you’re both very welcome, [@galadhir](https://tmblr.co/m8HGftbUphSdyHm9_zcKx5Q) and @lyledebeast! 💜 I like open discussions as other people can point out things I did not see before. 😉)

**Potboy**

[@lyledebeast](https://tmblr.co/m1UhN_sN_1G3K4V4VsVTpPg) *G* I cringed through most of the parts of  _Phasma_  that had Hux in them, because the Cardinal-Brendol-Armitage (familial) love triangle was just so awful and painful to read. I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been to live in it - except for Brendol, of course, who presumably was flattered and got a good laugh out of it. 

I’m not sure that Sloane was definitely still alive at that point. Cardinal says “If Admiral Sloane were here she wouldn’t like it,” and Armitage says something like “well she isn’t, so you can’t threaten me with that.” It’s never clarified whether she isn’t here because she’s on a different ship/somewhere else, or she isn’t here any more because she’s dead. (It’s one of the most frustratingly uninformative books I’ve ever read!) 

But yeah, I totally agree with you that emotional abuse is still abuse. One of the terrible things about it is that it’s so easy for everyone else around you to dismiss as something else. Particularly if the abuser is - like Brendol - good at being charming when they want to be. Ugh. And of course Cardinal doesn’t see it, because it’s not aimed at him. 

At least, he doesn’t see it until Phasma comes along and he’s suddenly not the favourite any more–at which point he immediately gets obsessed with the idea of getting rid of Phasma, because of course he can’t be so unimportant to Brendol that Brendol would just drop him once a more interesting project comes along. No, it can’t be Brendol’s fault. It must be Phasma, she’s evil… Poor bastard. If he hadn’t spent the first half of the book lording his superior loveability over Armitage I might have felt sorrier for him.

[@bxwtothefirstorder](https://tmblr.co/mxGmagoovxoFmDM_sepgrbg) I have a vague theory that Brendol wanted more from his son than to be a perfect trooper. A perfect trooper always obeys; a Hux takes charge. When we first meet Armitage he’s a terrified and polite little boy who is trying not to cry over the fact that he knows his father doesn’t love him. That’s the child that Brendol calls weak and useless (but with ‘potential’.)

Brendol was working on brainwashing children/instilling extreme loyalty in children back in his Imperial career as the commandant of a military academy, and the murder-children who freak Sloane out are his first attempt at something new for the First Order, so I think Brendol absolutely knew what he was doing with Armitage. There’s a part in Phasma where Cardinal notes that “there was something cruel and feral about [Hux]. Something put there by Brendol himself.”

So I figure that to some extent Brendol’s treatment of Armitage was deliberate as an attempt to add a viciousness of character that would make him more dangerous. And then of course little Armitage’s play-mates are a murder-squad of monster children and his teacher is a man who believes that getting children to kill each other is a great way to weed out the weak…. So yeah expending a tonne of effort on just staying alive sounds about right.

I hated the opening of TLJ too, but I saw it twice and on both occasions nobody laughed. There was a kind of mutual bemusement in the auditorium as though we were all asking ourselves what to make of this. From an in-universe pov I put the start of the film down to sleeplessness. Then he seems to have recovered by the point he smirks at Ren coming out of the throne room and he is his normal salty self again thereafter. I also hope he gets a good death! It doesn’t seem like much to ask for!

**Sigynstark**

I was wondering.  
Maybe Brendol knew Armitage had the potential and didn’t even think he was weak and useless, he just said that to manipulate Armitage to be - just as you wrote, galadhir - even more vicious. Just as Snoke did it.  
Armitage has more power than a General but he doesn’t advance in rank, as if the Supreme Leader knew if he gets even more power he’d become untameable… I’m thinking that Snoke saw the same potential in Armitage which Brendol did, but Snoke purposefully keeps him on a leash, didn’t let him to more power, because in that moment he’d cease to be a ‘rabid cur’ whose ‘weakness’ he could 'easily manipulate’.  
I rewatched the Hux scenes from TFA and TLJ and it’s painful to see how he changed. Being on Snoke’s vessel kinda broke him. In TFA when he told Snoke he’d take full responsibility and Snoke interrupted him Hux looked straight pissed. In TLJ he was terrified when he was told that Snoke was looking for him.  
And what would the people who were loyal to him think of the fact he’d been humiliated in front of them? It pissed me off beyond belief. That’s one thing everyone probably knew Snoke was punishing him harshly (I mean the amount of paleness can’t just be the lack of sunlight, right) but to witness it themselves? Snoke purposefully undermines him, strips him of his dignity in front of others who should respect him.  
Then, Kylo does the very same. Even if what Hux says has much more sense than what Kylo actually does.  
Though, if Snoke and Kylo weren’t Force users, they’d be already fucken’ DEAD. xD  
I’m wondering what will happen - where will Kylo lead the First Order, if he’s going to 'lead’ it at all. He made it very clear he’d want everything to burn, so he has no real reason to stick to Hux and his army. He could just form his own merry band of murderers (cough where the fuck are the Knights of Ren cough) and attack the Resistance, the Order and the remains of the Republic.  
Why choose a side, he hates everyone anyway.

**Potboy**

Heh, that whole “weak and useless” thing says more about Brendol than it does about Hux, in my opinion. What kind of man looks at his own five year old son and says “oh, he’s kind of scrawny and pathetic, but I’m sure I can turn him into a decent weapon in time.” Five year old children are not  _supposed_  to be strong and useful. It’s not something your normal parent is supposed to be looking for in their infant who is only just old enough to start going to school.

I don’t think it says anything at all about Armitage, other than that he was perhaps a normal child who hadn’t shown any particular aptitude for killing things at that point.

It was actually Gallius Rax who proved what little Armitage was made of. He put him in a room with a bunch of monsters who terrified even Sloane and told him to take charge or die. I don’t know if Rax cared what happened next - he struck me as the kind of person who would be equally entertained if the kids had torn Armitage apart, but Armitage overcame his fear and did take charge. And he’s pretty much been doing exactly that same thing since, with Snoke and Ren. He’s been facing up to the monsters and attempting to get them to do as he says ever since. I love that about him. It’s the one thing they haven’t changed from TFA. He is so incredibly brave.

(As an aside, I think it’s quite neat that Armitage is to Gallius Rax what Rax was to Palpatine - the little kid he picked up on Jakku, to whom he gave power and the legacy that Palpatine had given him. I’m not sure that Rax intended to hand on the mantle at that point, but I bet it tickled him to be here as the dark master this time, instead of as the terrified mouse of a child being rescued.)

Watching TFA it seems to to me that Hux dreads Snoke’s summons - which is fair enough. As far as we know he still hasn’t been punished for Starkiller’s fate. He probably thinks this is the point where he’s going to die - but he attempts to save face by taking the call in private. Snoke denies him that, and he looks pretty shaken when he first raises his head from being wiped on the deck, but he sneers on the way up. And the moment he’s talking he’s recovering ground to the point where he ends the conversation not only still alive but also back in favour. IMO, that’s not a man who’s broken - he’s still playing to win.

As for Kylo Ren, yeah. He treats Hux like his personal stress ball. And everyone in the FO is watching this. And everyone’s watching as Hux gives Kylo good advice, which Kylo ignores. And everyone’s watching while Kylo fucks everything up because he ignores Hux’s advice. Hux picks himself off the floor and  _keeps doing his job_ , and at the end of that, it’s not Hux who comes across looking like a weak, irrational failure.

I quite agree that if Kylo wasn’t a Force User he’d be dead already. (Not sure about Snoke. He may have been more useful, and Hux seems genuinely upset that he’s dead.) And I agree too that Kylo’s plan seems to be “burn it all down.” Which is not going to be of use to the First Order at all. I also think that that last glare Hux gives Kylo is the glare of a man who has decided that Kylo is going down. So if Hux doesn’t attempt a coup in IX, I’ll be very surprised.

**Filigranka**

side notes to myself:

  * one of the themes of SW seems to be “putting viciousness and hate in one own subjects/apprentices/next gen” both as a Dark Side philosophy, when it’s said completely straight, and as a general theme, trope, motif for the bad side (at least on intentional level; I personally think that new EU put much too much viciousness into the nominally good side, too), and the Brendol-Armie story mirrors it, even to the point of apprentice killing the master, so to speak (makes sense, thematically, for someone who was inspired by Jedi, but chose the Dark Side). All the Imperial rulers were killed by their subordinates, not outside forces, which I find both amusing and the natural consequence of the above rule/theme. Not very wise, I’d say, but my priorities if I was an Evil Overlady would be very different than the Sith ones, so.  _Cultural differences._
  * I’d cautiously say that Hux’ bravery  _might_ come from  ~~a broken place like everything in FO~~  needing to have some control over the life, including his own abuse and sometimes sorta courting it just to get over with it, because one doesn’t believe (well, in FO rightly so) that one’s going to avoid it, no matter what one does. As usual, just a headcanon, interpretation, all disclaimers apply. ;)
  * (checking AO3) my and fandom needs are, of damn course, absolutely contrary
  * Rax is just this type of chaotic evil Joker character he’s both terrifying and amusing. Such a shame he died, FO would be even funnier with him (hm. there should be tons of the places in the galaxy the light of the explosion still didn’t reach. one can make a moving celebration, moving the fleet to observe it time and time again! with balloons and cakes! Disneeeey, you’re missing the merch goldmine here)
  * “other than that he was perhaps a normal child who hadn’t shown any particular aptitude for killing things at that point.” - How dare he. The nerve. ;) Are you trying to kill me via laughter-chocking me on the tea?
  * I (cautiously) think some of Hux strategy general ideas might come from his own “constantly under the wall, desperate die-or-win/control, nothing in-between” mode and him projecting it on others, TR and NR including (well, he might even be right in Leia’s case. hard to say at this point, EU Leia and film Leia kinda… take a two different roads at this point, imho - albeit she refused to die  _timely_ and when the will of the force would want her, I assume. that’s skirting pretty close to the Dark Side in my book and that’s  _interesting_ \- but probably unintentional, just an unfortunate mash up of the western modern concepts with the spirituality nominally very much not based on them). Although, tbh, they may also come from a place called “common sense” and “military basics” and if they seem meaningful it’s only because most of the other characters do not show any military thinking. 



**Potboy**

Yes, I agree that one of the big themes of the sequels is how damaging it can be to have a legacy. Both of the villains are essentially trying to finish what their father/grandfather started. They’ve kind of grown up in an atmosphere of the last generation’s issues boiled down, concentrated and extra embittered by time and distance. But yeah, I can’t help but feel that Brendol, in his last moments, might have been proud. He certainly finally achieved the successor he would have wanted.

I’m sure you’re right that everything in the FO, including Hux’s bravery is created/influenced by abuse and coming out of a broken place. There’ll be elements of trying to control the inevitable and get it over with, and also elements of reckless self-harm. I don’t know that that makes it any less admirable, though. In fact I find it more poignant that way.

I’m never very sure what to make of Leia. I remember reading in one of the new tie-in novels that she was willing to see the galaxy burn if she thought it was necessary, and that was one of the reasons I’ve often thought that she and Hux were quite alike. I mean, if one twin was dark side, it would definitely be Leia.

**Filigranka**

Ah, all these poor people following me and reading my fics, especially in Polish, know what Imake of Leia. And of Leia and Hux XD. 100 000 words of fics. And another thousands words of meta. XD It hit me - hard. So very, very hard. I think it will soon become a meme in my fandom circle. 

Boiling down to “they’re worth of each other, poor, broken indoctrinated children tearing the galaxy apart, the galaxy should force them into contract government/arranged marriage* and get it over with, wait till they die and start creating a republic anew, 40 years on the desert-style”.

And I didn’t mean to imply Hux is less brave if his this particular trait of him comes from a place of harm and is, probably, often a little bit misguided. It’s human. 

* Whichever tropes you prefer. Contract government I basically wrote already, albeit as the finishing point, not the beginning. I’ll write arranged marriage-sorta-thing for them, one day, every ship and… platonic-ship? (fandom needs a word for “I want to read about this characters interacting, but not necessarily in a romantic way”) in SW needs its own arranged marriage and stranded on some terrible planet AUs.  ~~I might have drafts and scenes, and ideas already.~~

**Potboy**

I still totally want to write the ‘Hux and Leia are stranded on a planet together’ fic. Not sure about arranged marriage - I’d like to read it, but I think I’d flounder writing that romance stuff (by which I mean 'sex and the interpersonal relationships that go with it’, because I’m sure there’d be nothing 'romantic’ about it.  
  
What’s holding me back is that I don’t really know Leia very much, and there’s so much canon for her out there, and I’ve only read Bloodline out of the new stuff. I could go with movie canon, I suppose. I have at least seen all the films!  
  
Maybe you could translate some of your meta/fics? Or if they were written before I followed you and are in English, I could go back and look for them. That’s a radical idea!


	7. Why the Republic Is Loathsome

[Sigynstark said](https://galadhir.tumblr.com/post/178609247765/lyledebeast-galadhir-bxwtothefirstorder)

Okay I’m torturing myself with Hux feels and– can I point it out that I think Hux’s first memory was his father saying that he’s  _as thin as a paper and just as useless_  ( _but has potential_ ) when he was 4 and his next one that the Republic  **besieged Arkanis like–**  
Imo the speech he gives in TFA is much more than just a speech, and that expression when he told Snoke  _‘the Republic’_ , both times he seemed genuinely pissed at it. I’ve been wondering, why does he have so much hatred for the New Republic? I like to think it’s because of that. A part of his hatred could come from the fact he had to flee Arkanis because of them. From his perspective the Republic is bad, and he’s doing something to free the people from it ( _”every villain is a hero in his own mind”_ , huh?). Ofc he must’ve been fed with propaganda all the time and it had to have a part in it but the  **besiege**.  _His bloody **home**. _ **Taken.**  When he was only ** _five._**  And we have no idea what happened to his mother but if he knew her and she stayed there and– **you know.** _Feels._   **Bad.**

**Potboy**

Yep, he is just old enough for maximum trauma, in that he’s old enough to remember the seige/being dragged away from his planet/his mum, but not old enough to understand exactly why, beyond “the bad men came for us.”

**Lyledebeast**

But the New Republic did A BAD THING!

Hux fits right in with most of  the SW fandom, doesn’t he? I’m only being about half facetious, because yes, blowing up a system of planets is a lot worse than besieging one planet.  And it is kind of ridiculous for Hux to carry this childish, reductive view of war into not only adulthood but an adulthood in which he himself is waging war and making these decisions that kill millions in the name of his cause.

Except he’s also been reared on propaganda and never been offered any other perspective.  We don’t come to see others with more nuance purely by being alive longer; we get to that point through encounters with people who are different from us.  Hux doesn’t appear to have had any chance at that.

If we asked why the siege of Arkanis was necessary, we’d probably get the answer that “war is complicated.” And it is, but apparently “war is complicated” isn’t an acceptable reason to feel sorry for Hux, even though we know these things, and it’s incredibly easy to construct a story from them that explains why his is Like This. 

Because apparently political regimes get to be complicated but human beings don’t.

**Potboy**

We know from “Phasma” too that Hux has been involved with recruiting children from Republic worlds so poor that cannibalism is a way of life, where the abandoned factories of the Republic’s corporate entities have turned into pits of monsters that prey on their planets’ inhabitants. We know from the Aftermath books that the Republic is full of gangs of street children, whom nobody is looking after. We know that even Leia Organa couldn’t get the Republic government to take action - she had to create a private army of her own in order to make a difference…

By which I mean that Hux may well have more reason to think the Republic is loathsome than merely the fact that it conquered his world and killed his mother. If his experiences as an adult are experiences of the Outer Rim worlds which the rich 1% of the Republic have left to starve - where people like Phasma and her clan are willing to cross impassible wastes to join the First Order for the promise of regular food - it’s not surprising he hasn’t learned to see it in any better light.

(I mean, yes, in addition to the fact that he’s been raised on propaganda by a man who specialized in child brainwashing, in an echo-chamber of Imperial fanatics a long way away from a dissenting voice.)

**Flyting**

And not just Arkanis- pretty much every bad thing in his life can be traced back to the Republic?

Why was he raised by Brendol (with all the shit and abuse that implies)? Because the republic destroyed his home.

Why is the First Order based in the Unknown Regions (an area known for being unexplored and difficult to survive in)? Because they had to escape the Republic.

All the shit that happened to him growing up? The Republic’s fault.

On top of that- we never have found out for certain what happened to his mother, but isn’t it presumed she  **died**  during the siege of Arkanis?

Like you said, Hux is a  **prime**  example of ‘every villain is a hero in his own mind’. As far as he’s concerned, he has some personal, legitimate reasons for hating the Republic.

 


End file.
